Why Indians trust Quikr & Olx more than publicised richer brands

Here's what makes the online players stack up higher on trust than the other brands that have more prolific offerings.Pranay Chulet, (42), the founder of Indian online classifieds brand, Quikr is an avid fan of films; so much so that while working in New York at a consulting firm in the mid-2000s, he ended up doing a course in filmmaking at the New York Film Academy. The passion turned him into a temporary filmmaker (he made a new-format feature film that also turns into a videogame) and the making of which in a quirky way, gave him the idea for his future start-up.

It so happened that while making the film, he had used the US classified brand Craigslist as his go-to solution for many things – from casting, to recruiting crew members, and even renting his apartment in New York while in India. It made him realise the absence of such a one-stop shop solution in India, and Quikr was thus born in 2008.

Ever since, the brand has crossed many milestones and is reported to be worth $1.5 billion logging in an estimated 1.5 million transactions every month. It has attracted multiple rounds of funding from investors that include Tiger Global, Kinnevik and Warburg Pincus among others.

Olx the other online classifieds brand, founded by entrepreneurs Fabrice Grinda and ACF Oxenford, and now owned by South African internet group Naspers, was launched in India in 2006. Ironically when BE reached out to the Indian team of Olx for their perspective about the brand's journey and its more than decent debut performance in the survey, the company declined to comment. Their email reply said, "as a corporate entity, Olx's policies do not consent it to participate or comment on industry wide market surveys and researches wherein they are not introduced to the methodology, target audience and sampling procedures from before."

What connects these brands is the fact that they have done remarkably well in the newly introduced category of ecommerce and services, in the Most Trusted Brands Survey 2015 and have debuted at Number 2 and 3 respectively, pertinently surging ahead of brands like Snapdeal, Amazon and Yatra among others. An obvious question: what makes them stack up higher on trust than the other brands that have more prolific offerings?

Says Navin Gaur, president, Lowe Lintas, Gurgaon, "Irrespective of the category, the simplest path for a brand to gain consumers' trust continues to be the one where it finds a genuine constructive role in their lives." In nascent categories, this task sometimes becomes more complex which is where the role of mass media comes into play. Both these brands have been extremely aggressive spenders on TV and print, of course, backed by a wellfunded war-chest.

According to Neeraj Bassi, ex-president planning, Ogilvy Gurgaon who has launched his own consultancy named Coffee and Chocolate, both the brands have used advertising very well to create the category in consumer's mind, and the biggest challenge (for them) now would be to make money to justify the high spends/ investments so far.

As per Chulet, Quikr's marketing, initially, was focused on both driving category adoption and creating brand awareness. "We first created the C2C category in India through our marketing and subsequently, started growing other categories such as cars, homes, jobs and services." Accordingly Quikrc2c, Quikrcars, Quikrhomes, Quikrjobs and Quikrservices were launched armed with innovative features.

Verticalisation has helped us go deeper into our strongest categories and we expect most categories to at least double if not triple their traf f ic and engagement in the next 12 months, he adds. The brand has signed on celebrities Ranveer Singh and Suriya as brand ambassadors for a wider reach.

In Olx's case, as per Gaur the communication helped in assisting people realise t he u nt ap p e d potential of used good slying around the house, while simultaneously addressing the adoption barriers. Being positioned as a tool that enables consumers to convert their used goods into cash that can help them fulfil one's own or the near ones' aspirations has helped the brand find acceptance. Transforming the cellphone into a sell-phone, deploying regional celebrities in the communication along with the comedian Kapil Sharma have been some of the innovations that have worked well for the brand.

According to Raghu Bhat, co-founder, Scarecrow that has been Quikr's agency for three years some of the creative properties like the audio mnemonic — Sell anything Quikrrrr, the missed call campaigns, Photo Khench Quikr pe Bech etc. helped in customer acquisition. In his view, even as brands in this category try to recover the high costs of customer acquisition by maximising the customer lifetime value of each acquisition through the various verticals, their challenge would be to battle with the specialists in each of these categories. It'll be an interesting and expensive battle, and one to watch out for.